Debunked!: Conspiracy Theories, Urban Legends, and Evil Plots of the 21st Century - Hardcover

Roeper, Richard

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9781556527074: Debunked!: Conspiracy Theories, Urban Legends, and Evil Plots of the 21st Century

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1556527071 ISBN 13: 9781556527074

Publisher: Chicago Review Press, 2008

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You know what's really going on, don't you? Flight 93 secretly landed in Cleveland, where the passengers were whisked off to a NASA facility. Nostradamus predicted JFK Jr.'s plane crash, which was engineered by the One World Government. Online poker sites are rigged to knock out the short stacks. Donald Rumsfeld was behind the bird flu panic.

That's what it's like to live inside the mind of the 21st-century conspiracy theorist, who believes that all you have to do is look at the signs and you'll see what's really going on. And thousands if not millions of people actually believe this is the way the world works.

Debunked! is a breezy but fact-filled dissection of more than two dozen of the most popular urban legends and conspiracy theories of the 21st century. As he did in Urban Legends and Hollywood Urban Legends, and as he has done in dozens of columns for the Chicago Sun-Times over the last decade and a half, Richard Roeper lays out the basics of each conspiracy theory, quotes some of the true believers—and then tears the theory apart with his bare hands.

This book will provide you with invaluable ammunition for the next time you communicate with someone from that other, shadow world—that place where secret tribunals pull the strings and influence the outcome of everything from terrorist attacks to professional sporting events.

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About the Author:

Richard Roeper is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and the co-host of Ebert & Roeper. He is the author of Sox and the City, Schlock Value, Ten Sure Signs a Movie Character Is Doomed, Urban Legends, and Hollywood Urban Legends.

From Booklist:

Newspaper columnist and TV movie reviewer Roeper takes on a variety of widely believed myths about pop culture, politics, sports, business, and even religion. He approaches his targets—whether conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Princess Diana or those mysterious faces appearing on food products—from a commonsensical point of view, asking simply, Where’s the evidence? For instance, you’ve heard that it wasn’t the airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center on 9/11 that caused the towers to fall, but rather that the collapse resulted from the towers being rigged with explosives in advance. Perfectly logical, except that the biggest piece of evidence in support of the theory (that jet fuel doesn’t burn at a temperature high enough to melt steel) is irrelevant (because the steel of the towers wouldn’t need to melt, just weaken and buckle). Along with pointing out why much-loved legends are asinine, Roeper isn’t above going for laughs (and getting most of them). Recommend this one to fans of Al Franken’s Lies (and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them) or the works of noted skeptics James Randi, Robert Baker, and Michael Shermer. --David Pitt

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